ISN'T HARRY MIXED?:

'Lemony Snicket' Creator Comes to Grips With Fame (Gabriel Sanders, February 25, 2005, The Forward)

"It occurred to me on the way over here," Handler said, settling into his seat, "that I'm meeting with the Jewish Forward to talk about my Jewishness — and it's a Friday night."

Handler grew up in San Francisco's Balboa Terrace neighborhood, a part of town "utterly unknown to the casual visitor," he said. His family lighted Sabbath candles on Friday nights, and belonged to a synagogue. In 1987, Handler was chosen to be among the first of the Bronfman Youth Fellows, a program that took smart high school students from across the Jewish spectrum to Israel. "I was on the far secular end of the people who were there," he said, "but I felt more Jewish when going, and that's really stuck with me."

Today Handler says he has trouble finding a Jewish community that's a good fit for him. "If you're craving the kind of Judaism where most of the services are in Hebrew," he said, "and you don't want teriyaki shrimp served at the [post-Yom Kippur] break-fast, then that means taking on things like strong religious beliefs and Zionist politics. If you don't want all that, then there's a whole lot of hesitation."

What's perhaps not clear to those unfamiliar with the Snicket series is that though marketed to children between the ages of 8 and 12 — and with more than 25 million copies sold, they're certainly succeeding — they are, at the same time, exceedingly learned books. Allusions abound, from Dante to T.S. Eliot and from Salinger to Pynchon. Handler is clearly the sort of writer whose prose is the product of a lifetime of reading. He once said that his books are set "in a space that only has to do with other books." And in some cases he's drawn readers who share his devotion to words. "There are readers of the Snicket books who'll reread them with the thorough attention of one of those Yeshiva guys who'll stick a pin through the Talmud and tell you what letter it'll go through on every page," he said.

After that, we had to ask: Are the Baudelaire orphans — the luckless trio who lose their parents in a fire on the first pages of the Lemony Snicket saga and are then shuttled from relative to relative for further misadventures in the books that follow — Jewish?

In an answer that only brought attention to its own insufficiency, Handler said, "Yes."

And what about Harry Potter?

"If you subscribe to the current Zadie Smith dichotomy," he said referring to the British author's recent book "The Autograph Man," in which the protagonist sees the Jewish/goyish divide wherever he turns, "then yes, the Baudelaires are Jewish and Harry Potter is gentile, but if you're talking about some sort of grander philosophy, I'd have to say no."

Handler has maintained that the Baudelaire orphans may have had their origins in the story of his own father, who, in 1938, at the age of 10, fled Danzig, which was then part of Germany.